“We went to a movie. Then we had two beers. Then he put his penis inside of my vagina.” – bad description of a good date

I have friends who chronicle their sexiest of sexitudinest times, those nights so hot that it looks like a fire hydrant has exploded in the bed… and then, after they’re done jotting down their descriptions of non-Euclidean sexual positions and out-of-body experiences, they wonder why nobody comments.

Well, it’s because you’re listing instead of writing.

Now, keep in mind that written erotica is like porn or pizza in that no matter how bad it is, someone is whacking off to it. (Rule #34, people.) Human beings are basically a big ol’ fuck-making machine wrapped inside a thin layer of justification, so if you told people that this refrigerator was totally hot for their bodies, some significant subset of people would go, “Oh, God, the fridge wants me. Look at the way the cubes in her icemaker are jiggling.”

But over the past couple of days, I’ve tossed off a couple of FetLife posts (they’re the Facebook for kinksters!) that might be of interest, even if I consider them a tad too sexually explicit for here:

Hey, guys! The Clarion Blog-A-Thon starts today – and with it, my attempt to outline my novel live, in a members-only community, as an advanced seminar in plotting, theme, and character! A $10 donation and an email to theferrett@theferrett.com with your LJ name will get you access – and also help one of the greatest writing workshops in history.

How good is Clarion? In twenty pre-Clarion years, I had three sales. In three post-Clarion years, I had twenty sales. That’s how much you learn. And the Clarion Echo, where I’m doing all of this plotting, is designed to be a little taste of Clarion. I’m certainly teaching you everything I learned. So I’ll ask you to donate, both for a good cause and some entertaining tutorials.

So what am I writing today? It’s an essay on what benchmarks make for a good scene, and it starts like this:

To plot this novel during the Blog-a-Thon, I’m going to have to break everything down into scenes. That’s tricky for me, because I’m an exploratory writer — I usually don’t know what’s going to happen until the words hit the page.

Now, in a lot of cases, I get to a point where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s when my writing theory skills come in handy.

See, all that writing advice you’ve ever gotten? You never need it when a story is working. You only need to reach into that bag of tricks when a scene’s falling flat, or an ending is nowhere in sight, or when that character is relentlessly limp.

Now, for me, when I hit that terrifying blank page, I fall on my old standbys for What To Do When You Don’t Know What Happens Next. Neil Gaiman told me that every story is really about what a character needs — and so I think, “What life lesson could this character use most in this moment, and how can I teach it to her?” James Patrick Kelly taught me that if I couldn’t figure out what happened next, come up with ten terrible endings and think about why they’re terrible… And lo, elucidating the reasons I hate this awful, cheesy, and obvious ending makes me realize what I want to have happen. And I have my own custom advice, which is, “If you were the GM in a game, how would you plot this?”

All utterly unneeded when things are going well. But when instinct fails, theory’s what gets you back on track.

So for me, in unfamiliar territory, I thought about what would make a good scene for this novel, so I’d have a clear-cut set of tests to apply during plotting. I read probably four or five books dealing with novel-writing and outlining, to try to devise a set of “acid tests” to see if something was up to snuff. Which is important in novels; a short story is usually about one or two ideas, and if your writing is compelling or your ideas dazzling, you can kind of tapdance around that rotten hole in the stage. But for novels, you need to have an underlying structure that works… and without actually writing the scene, something I’ve always done before, I need something else as a sanity check for this novel.

Note those words: for this novel. I’m writing what hopefully will be a very cinematic, simple script — other novels may have different scene requirements. For example, some novels may need breather scenes where the character sits back and thinks. That’s not the effect I’m going for here, so I’m going to try not to have those.

So what will my sanity checks for this novel, as we plot it out together, you and I? I made a list. And that list contains both generically good scene advice, and advice specific for this novel….

So! You want to make people masturbate to thoughts of you, using only your phone. And yet whenever you text, “I STICK IT IN. I STICK IT IN!!!!!” you get nothing but awkward silences.

Possibly because this is because you accidentally sexted your mother. Or possibly it is because you do not know the secrets of effective sexting. And you know who knows all the secrets of effective sexting? Not me. Shit, that’s a deep well, dude. There’s like ten million ways to get someone off with your mind and an unlimited data plan.

…but I know a few.

The essay’s over here, and actually contains some pretty salient tips on writing customized erotica. So go check it out, if you’re interested. Ask questions. Kick the tires, you know how it is.

I’ve been quiet here as I’ve been slogging through the usual Seasonal Depression, but I did post two essays over at FetLife (TheFacebookforkinksters) that you may be curious about: “Depression. Fucking. Depression.”, which deals with how depression affects my sex life, and “Ropeweasels,” which deals with the issue of me being tied up. (There’s also “Fireplay and Me,” an oddly poetic musing on setting women aflame, which I don’t think I linked here but maybe I did.)

In addition, my humor essay “So I’m Going To Become A Dom” may be my most popular essay ever, with 612 comments and 965 loves. I guess it’s all about the specificity.

Today, I have two essays for you, but neither of them are located here. Sorry; you’ll have to click twice. An inconvenience, I know.

The first essay is at a new magazine called Kink-e-Zine, a San Francisco-based online publication devoted towards sane and safe kinky sexual practices. I’ve agreed to write a monthly humor column for them, and my first one is a letter called “Dear Dude Who Sends My Female Friends Pictures Of His Penis.” It’s an analysis of why men are so trigger-happy to send women cock shots, and it starts like this:

Some women might be interested if your penis was, like, the Monolith from 2001, something so huge that people squinted and said, “Is that a sequoia?” But no. You introduce yourself with an excruciatingly average cock shot.

Now, I think I know why you do this, but let me explain my logic.

See, to you, women’s brains are basically this annoying lock to be cracked in order to get at the juicy sexiness beneath. You really could care less what they think; what you want are tits and a hot pussy, and if you have to mutter a few magical incantations like “I see” and “That’s interesting” to get it, well, you’ll tolerate some conversation.

But largely, to you, women are a buffet….

I go on from there, analyzing motivations. But this happens a lot on FetLife, and I’ve heard horror stories from women on OKCupid. Really, dudes? Stop making me look bad.

My other writing is on FetLife (theFacebookforKinksters), discussing scenes from Cleveland’s very own Kinko de Mayo festival. They had all sorts of classes on various topics including erotic wrestling, needleplay, flogging to catharsis, and one pretty brutal crucifixion demo (which, unfortunately, I missed). I wrote up my experiences of the weekend, detailing my first fire play with strangers, how I sprained my finger erotic wrestling, and my new toy.

So I started doing my “sex blogging” over on FetLife (theFacebookOfKinksters) about a year ago, when I started exploring some of the dominant sides of my sexuality. Which, despite Fet’s often-depressing adherence to “traditional” sexual roles (OH GOD HOW MANY LEATHERY MASTERS AND WAIFY SUBS DO WE NEED?), has turned out to be a good idea. I’ve made some nice friends there, and gotten some really useful advice when exploring some delicate stuff that I’m not ashamed of but don’t want to throw out to the world without an invite.

(There’s a fuzzy line between “being dominant with female partners” and “being a misogynist asshole” that’s often entirely based on context between a partner who’s agreed to things, and this blog is often very context-free.)

That said, I wrote somewhat of a retrospective today called “The Once and Always Vanilla,” where I discuss the changes that have been wrought in my life over the past year, and where I may (or may not) be going, and how I may still have the label “Vanilla” on Fet.

“You are so not vanilla any more.”

It’s been about a year since I set out on my exploration of BDSM, and my whole life has shifted to fit that. Even my “vanilla” sex now has overtones of kink to it – more hair-pulling, slapping, a bit of brutality in the softest of places….

If you’re interested, get an account and check it out. And if not, pass on. Not everyone wants to know what I do behind closed doors… but I can crack ‘em a bit for those who want to watch. (In case you’re interested, I also wrote up some erotica, some essays on fire play, and a few others that I didn’t link to, but they are still there.)

All my life I’ve been insecure about my sexual ability. No, check that:

All my life I’ve been insecure.

In a sense, that insecurity is a good thing, because it drives me mad to correct my faults. When I fuck, I fuck with a considerable amount of skill because I am determined to become better in bed with every coupling. If a woman is kind enough to let me into her bed, least I can do is not kiss like a slobbering German Shepherd. So I work that shit, even as I still lose myself in considerable passion. (I was told this weekend I “fuck like a beast,” which I’m going to purr over for a bit.)

But with insecurity comes the badness: the need for reassurance, the anxiety of Doing It Wrong, the drive to sometimes push when stasis is not only fine but what’s needed.

That said, one of the things that Neil Gaiman said to me at my Clarion class resonates in a weird way with sex….

Over on FetLife, that Facebook for kinksters, I’m musing about some problems I’m having in balancing my new kinkiness and keeping my existing girlfriends happy. This was a problem that came to a head at the end of 2011, leading to me pulling back a little on certain aspects of my kink until I can find a better solution than what I’ve been doing.

In 2011, I started getting kinkier. And that’s been a tremendous boon in many ways; I’ve been learning to talk dirty (no mean feat for this polite New England boy), I’ve come to understand that my facility with words can make me a good Dominant even when my lack of physical training falls short, and discovering that a little rough sex added in with my usual cuddles can really spice things up.

And a large part of that opening up was due to sexting….

This essay’s a little more personal than they tend to run, since it’s about a current problem I’m still struggling with, as opposed to my usual relationship essays of “Here’s what I did, and the wise solution that Gini helped me engineer to fix it.” And so I’m purposely stashing it behind a firewall of sorts. If you’re interested, then go over and look (and I’m told that BugMeNot has some FetLife logins). If not, then move on.

Once again, over at FetLife (the Facebook for Kinksters), I have chronicled a Tale of my sexual exploits… or kind of not. This is unusual for me, since I’m retelling an old story with a slightly new twist, about what hickies and scars mean to me. The beginning of the essay is as such:

There were thirty-two hickeys on my neck, each as precise as her kisses, these tiny blood-red ovals.

This was the only proof that we’d been together. And I didn’t even realize it until I got to school that day.

I suppose I should have been embarrassed. But to me, it was proof that a girl had touched me, had made out with me – which no one had before. Oh, my friend Sue had drunkenly kissed me when I was driving her home, but I was three months away from eighteen and that was all the action I’d ever gotten….

Long-time readers will doubtlessly recognize this tale as a variant on “The Great Misunderstanding,” which remains one of the best personal essays I’ve ever written. If you’ve ever been beaten down in high school, and wondered how I walked away from that, “The Great Misunderstanding” gives you what is, quite literally, my origin story. You discover how I lost my virginity and my shame in the same day.

The one on FetLife, “Immortalize Your Need On My Skin,” ties two memories together in a way that illuminates me. It’s a smaller tale, I suppose. But if you’ve been irked because I post the sexy-exploratory stuff on Fet, then go read “The Great Misunderstanding” (which is, ostensibly, about Magic: the Gathering but really it’s not) and you’ll get the gist. And if you are on Fet, then you can see bookends. In either case, if you like my writings, I’d head over. And if not, enjoy Black Friday.

The first thing a man learns from watching porn is that every cock is bigger than yours.

The porn-cocks are so huge that women need to choke up on them two-handed like they were baseball bats, which in a way they are. They’re so huge that when the cock passes over someone’s face, the cock’s shadow occludes them in a penis eclipse. That’s no moon, that’s this dude’s cock.

And if you watch straight porn, then you learn that pretty much any dude can have an enormous schvanzstucker. Gay porn, all the guys have six-pack abs and a face that makes Brad Pitt look like a seven-day-old Jack o’lantern, so you figure those dudes have flown here from the Planet Of Unfeasible Fantasy anyway. But straight porn is filled with dudes who look like that creepy dude at the McDonald’s drive-through window, except here he is unrolling this fire-hose of a whanger to flop across this girl, pinning her to the mattress. Straight porn’s willingness to employ people of all attractiveness levels based on their cock size sends the secret message that everyone has submarine-sized penises, no matter what they look like.

You can tell that my FetLife essays are extremely personal, because my marketing sucks. Normally, Mondays are the big day for new posts, certainly weekdays – traffic’s dead on weekends. And you especially don’t post an essay at 2:00 in the afternoon when no one’s reading, because the hits will be tragically low.

But I did promise to mention it here whenever I wrote an entry on Fet about my personal journey into alternative sexualities, and this one’s a fairly major one: an entry about my first public beating of a girl at the local BDSM club. Which either sounds way kinkier than it actually was, or I’m just getting really too fucking jaded.

A couple of people have complained about me moving my more sexual essays to FetLife. They don’t want to start a new account, they don’t like the ads, they don’t want to potentially get messages from skeevy people. All of which are valid complaints.

The answer is, “Then don’t read.” I’m not trying to advertise FetLife or anything, but the essays I’m writing there are of a different quality.

Let me explain: the essays I write for this blog here are polished for public consumption. I spend a bit of time on not just the content, but on how it’ll be perceived, making sure that they’re good enough that if a stranger who loathed me read it (which is pretty much a given) that my meaning would still be clear. I check them for clarity and correctness. When I fail to be clear (as I have with the Gay In YA post, which I’m still considering), it bothers me considerably.

There’s a lot of time and effort put into the posts here. Because I am, fundamentally, writing for an audience.

FetLife essays, however, are where I’m tracking an increasingly changing sexual landscape, where I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I’m starting to experiment with dominance, with being more open about my sexuality (not just reciting what I’m doing in a humorous way, as I’ve always done, but actually acknowledging the turn-on). I’m opening up new territories.

That’s fucking difficult enough to do by itself, let alone without having a bunch of strangers walking in and going, “Hey, why don’t you stick to movie reviews?” or “That’s a sick thought, you shouldn’t have it” or “Me and my seventy friends over here have analyzed your desires and we’re all having a coffee klatch about what’s wrong with you.”

I’m not excusing myself from the idea of being politically correct, mind you – but as Poppy Brite said, “I’m still figuring it out for myself, and I’d like to be able to chronicle these things without feeling guilty about it.” It’s easier to write about such things in a place that’s specifically designed for exploring such areas.

And you don’t have to read it. I’ve been asked to remind the people who don’t read FetLife a whole lot when I’ve updated, so they can go look. This is not me taunting you, this is me reacting in response to some people’s requests. And I’m happy to put up breadcrumbs.

I’m not saying you can’t come view it. You can. Come get an account, friend me – I’m a friend-slut, I just want to know who you are – but what I’m doing over there is, at its core, very different from what I’m doing here. It’s a smaller stage for a different audience, and purchasing the tickets is cheap…

…But just realize it’s a different venue. I’m learning. I’m going to make more mistakes as I learn more lessons. And it’s my right not to want to broadcast those mistakes to an indifferent crowd.

As with all my crazy-sexy essays, given that my sexuality’s in a bit of a state of flux (as chronicled here), I’ve posted this one on FetLife. The obligatory excerpt:

I was talking to LucidMoon the other day about Sybians, the Death Star of sex toys. Supposedly you mount the most frigid, repressed, born-again woman on one of these babies for ten minutes and she’ll stagger off of it with her hair down in tangles, shuddering with delight, having renounced Jesus for the joys of electricity and kinky goddamned science.

I’ve thought about getting one myself, and unfortunately I am in the middle-class financial value of “It’s not that you CAN’T afford it, it’s that you SHOULDN’T.” I mean, I could shell out $1400 for what looks like a gymnast’s horse designed by horny satyrs… But should I? Would we use it enough? Would my wife divorce me, figuring that the hobby horse of doom is a lot cheaper than I am and more satisfying to boot?

And really, where would we put it when the kids came by? It’s hard enough hiding the whips and chains in our closet in a box marked “YAHTZEE.” They’ve gone to play a board game before, and discovered what Mommy and Stepdaddy like to do, and been scarred.

The best thing I’ve written this week is not here, but in fact over at the literature site Fantasy Matters. They asked me to write an essay for banned books week, and what came out was an intensely personal piece on parenting, the danger of books, and the need to manage censorship properly.

A sample is thus:

One cannot help but think about censorship when you’re showing your sixteen-year-old daughter rape scenes.

Not that I set out to show her rape; we were simply playing our usual summer challenge of “What movie should I have seen by now?” Whenever my daughter Amy stayed for the summer, she would call me over to our voluminous library of DVDs so I would help further her cinematic education.

“Well, what are you in the mood for?” I’d ask, and choose a significant movie that she should have watched by now – from the bureaucratic nightmare of Brazil to the comfort watching of Princess Bride to the hard-edged romance-meets-reality of Casablanca. Then we’d discuss what was interesting about the movie — the approaches to character, plot choices, and of course the history of the production, with constant lookups on IMDB.

For the past week, we’d been on a Stanley Kubrick kick – she’d despised The Shining, liked Full Metal Jacket, and so I said that really, no showing of Kubrick could be complete without watching A Clockwork Orange.

…which I did not remember being quite so rapetastic. I remembered violence, certainly, and scenes of sexual assault, but I didn’t remember them as being this brutal and explicit and extended. This was far ahead of what I was comfortable showing her.

Should I stop the movie? Should I censor this, and move to another film?

On Friday, I posted a link to the Zombie Fleshlights, and in the comments a number of people asked, “I mean, how good can the Fleshlight be, anyway?”

I figured I might as well tell you. I mean, I do own one. I don’t use it much, but you should know why. So, as with most sexy things I’m doing these days, I posted an essay over at FetLife (the Facebook for kinksters!) that you can go read, assuming you want a surfeit of personal details. Here’s the opening, if you’re curious:

If you’re looking for a vagina in a can, the Fleshlight allows you to pork your portable pussy in a properly perky procedure. But it’s not until you explode into delight into an artificial mouth that you realize just how convenient it is having an actual girl attached to the vagina.

Because the thing about having sex with a girl is that when you’re done, she nips off to the bathroom to tidy up, and then all of those helpful organs and biological processes take care of the rest. The Fleshlight, being an inert mass of food-grade (GAH!) polymers, merely sits there, leaving your semen to a) drool back out onto the floor, or b) sit inside its enfolded interior until it congeals, rots, merges with a new form of germ to gain sentience, and then slither up your cock the next time you stick it in side to lay eggs and give birth to the new army of manborg sex toys. Awkward.

Anyway, if you want to see it, signing up for FetLife is free, and as an added bonus, you can friend Poppy Z. Brite over there and see his writings, which are phenomenal. Just make sure to tell me where you know me from if you friend me, so I can associate LJ names with Fet names. Danke!

A long time ago, I moved the more explicit meanderings on my personal sexuality over to FetLife, the Facebook for kinksters, so that people who didn’t want to hear the in-depth travails on my personal sexual journeys didn’t have to see it. (Also, so my family could easily avoid it.) But I did promise to leave a link here whenever I wrote over at FetLife, and so I have today.

Today’s essay is called “A Different Kind of Domination,” and it asks a very personal question: “Who am I when I fuck?” (Aside from both Moose and Squirrel, of course.) If you want to go look, well, you know where it is.

(And if you’re going to friend me on FetLife, feel free – but as with all other social networks, tell me who the fuck you are. As usual, with differing usernames, how am I supposed to know that TheFlyingFelcher is actually CharityWhore on LJ? I don’t ask for much, just gimme a clue.)